Deciding the FIFO stability of networks in polynomial time

FIFO is the most prominent queueing strategy due to its simplicity and the fact that it only works with local information. Its analysis within the adversarial queueing theory however has shown, that there are networks th

FIFO is the most prominent queueing strategy due to its simplicity and the fact that it only works with local information. Its analysis within the adversarial queueing theory however has shown, that there are networks that are not stable under the FIFO protocol, even at arbitrarily low rate. On the other hand there are networks that are universally stable, i.e., they are stable under every greedy protocol at any rate r < 1. The question as to which networks are stable under the FIFO protocol arises naturally. We offer the first polynomial time algorithm for deciding FIFO stability and simple-path FIFO stability of a directed network, answering an open question posed in [1, 4]. It turns out, that there are networks, that are FIFO stable but not universally stable, hence FIFO is not a worst case protocol in this sense. Our characterization of FIFO stability is constructive and disproves an open characterization in [4].